Okay, I guess this series isn’t slow-to-update after all. Part 3 . . .
✿ The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey (1969)
SYNOPSIS: What happens when a disabled spaceship falls in love?
OVERVIEW: Helva, a disabled child, becomes a spaceship! I’ll just quote the opening paragraph for the set-up:
SHE WAS BORN A THING and as such would be condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies. There was always the possibility that though the limbs were twisted, the mind was not, that though the ears would hear only dimly, the eyes see vaguely, the mind behind them was receptive and alert.
Helva passes. There is a perceptive mind within that disabled body. Her parents are given two choices: euthanize their baby or give Helva a future as a “brain ship” with the promise of grand adventures and service to Central Worlds. They choose life—eternal life in a titanium shell. Baby Helva is handed over to the care of Central Worlds where she attends Central Laboratory School (a terrifying name) to begin her training. Helva and other disabled children like her are then transferred into metal shells. (Some don’t survive.) Shell-people are kept physically small through pituitary manipulation to eliminate “the necessity of transfers from smaller to larger shells.” They’re also put through conditioning (shell-psychology) to prepare them for their “unusual confinement” in their future jobs as brain ships. Once a ship, they’re partnered with able-bodied scouts, or brawns. (The ship and scouts have very close relationships 💋)
The book’s six chapters are different adventure stories featuring Helva. I’m not going to give a detailed overview of the stories, but I would recommend reading the series because Helva really is an interesting character.
OTHER THOUGHTS: Like part 2, the theme of medical debt comes up again in this series: “In theory, once a shell-person had paid off the massive debt of early care, surgical adaptation, and maintenance charges, he or she was free to seek employment elsewhere.” Helva is never given a choice about becoming a ship. She’s also programmed against going rogue (i.e. flying away to live independent of Central Worlds). “A ship run by a human could not run rogue or insane with the power and resources Central had to build into their scout ships.”
THEMES: disability and mental capacity, medical debt/servitude, disability and love
RECOMMENDED PAIRED READING: Again, I recommend Jillian Weise’s essay Common Cyborg who compares Helva to the case of Ashley X.
In 2004, the parents of a six-year-old white disabled girl, named Ashley X, ordered her hysterectomy, the removal of her breast buds and an appendectomy. This would make it easier for her parents to care for her, relieve her of menstrual cramps, prevent pregnancy and remove the threat of sexual abuse by caregivers. Her parents consider the treatment a success. First we read about this in a sci-fi novel, then in a feminist manifesto, and finally in the medical journals.
For more on Ashley, see also Alison Kafer’s chapter “At the Same Time, Out of Time: Ashley X” from Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013).
I would also recommend the podcast Invisible Institutions, “a new documentary podcast exploring the past and present of institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Canada.”